At sixteen Jack Darling was rated as one of the hottest properties coming up in football - but a less than stellar season with injury and off field issues resulted in Darling slipping dramatically down the pecking order to the point where the Eagles were able to take him with an end-of-first-round priority pick garnered for a shocking 2010 season.

Darling has since shown exactly why he was promoted as the next best thing - debuting first up in 2011, he played all but two games in his rookie season, but it was his second season, when asked to stand up for much of the season as the club's primary tall forward he shone, leading the goalkicking with 53 goals, fourth in the club's best and fairest and becoming the first Eagle to kick a goal in every game of a season. There doesn't have to be much more improvement in Darling for him to already be the bargain of the 2011 draft.

By 2014 he was a key part of the Eagles team, but he was missing at the start of 2015 with injury. Coming back mid-season, he was initially back to his best, but a lack of conditioning seemed to plague the later part of the season and the finals where he struggled to play his best footy. A full pre-season my be what he needs.

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A lot
of thanks are due to other people for the stats on this
page. For all games from 1993-2002, thanks to Paul
at AFL Statshttp://stats.rleague.com/afl/afl_index.html.
For the 1987-1992 stats, much thanks to carneagles
for providing me a copy of the stats created for corkintheocean,
probably the best footy blog out there. Go read it!